Beth:
Hi, I’m Beth with TB Properties Buys Land. We’re going to continue our series on Fact or Fiction, Myth or Reality, and today’s topic is inherited land. Is it truly a blessing? When we think about inheritances, such as inheriting land or even a home, that can seem like that’s quite a blessing in that you can sell the property for a profit and do something with that. It may seem like a blessing until you get that first bill from the tax assessor’s office for the property taxes owed on that property. That can be a gut punch, especially if there are back taxes you didn’t know about! You might even get a demand letter in the mail saying that you have to clean up your property. I remember we bought some property inside the city limits, and we hadn’t even received the deed back in the mail when we got a letter from the city saying that we owed fines because we had to mow the lot. As you can see, there can be some unanticipated costs to inheriting a property, but at the same time, if you are financially able to take care of those costs and you are able to sell it, that can be an amazing blessing to have the cash to use as you need.
However, on the flip side, inherited land can be a total nightmare in which you may never, in fact, reap a reward. The first question we might ask is: what was the process in which you inherited the land? If the property was willed to you and the will has been probated, that is generally a pretty easy process after that. However, if there was no will and you merely assume you are heir to the property, there are further questions you might need to answer. First, in whose name was the deed? If you have inherited property from, perhaps a parent or a grandparent, it will be important to know if the deed was actually in their name or did they inherit it from another family member themselves? If they never cleared the chain of title by actually going to the county and making the transfer in their own name, it could muddy the chain of title. The reason I say this, is that if this property is merely land passed down over the years as people pass away, and you just assume that you’ve inherited this property, there may be complications in the chain of title, in determining who and perhaps, how many may have a stake in the sale of the property. For example, if you go to sell this property, the title company may do their title search and come back to you, saying, “Listen, this property is so old that there are no records of a particular family member,” (we’ve seen this one before!), or they may say, “there’s a hundred different heirs all over the country and we can’t even find all the heirs that could possibly have a right a stake in this property, sorry, we can’t complete the transaction because everyone has to sign off on the sale and we can’t track them all down.”
If it’s not clear cut whose name is on the deed, that could be quite a burden for you. You may not even be able to sell the property. You may even have to hire a real estate attorney to try to dig through the past deed records, and it may end up costing you. However, if they can clear the chain of title and you can sell it, it may be worthwhile. Unfortunately, if you pay for that attorney and they can’t clear the chain of title and you can’t sell that property, now you’re out that money. That is entirely possible too.
Here, at TB Properties Buys Land, we work with inherited property quite a bit. I know that when inheriting property from a family member, you may not have the funds to try to hire an attorney to clean the title. You may not be able to take the risk that the property may never be able to be deeded to you, and we’ve certainly seen that before. There have been times we tried to buy property and we just couldn’t due to a few of the scenarios I mentioned just earlier: there were too many heirs and legally it couldn’t be done, or there were too many heirs to agree on a price, or even missing heirs, and in those situations so we had to walk away from that transaction. That is something we certainly have experience with! In many case, we have been able to work with title companies and attorneys or been able to utilize affidavits of heirship to make sure that legally someone could sell their property to us. In those cases, the chain of title can be cleared and documented and there is title insurance on the property for you, so that you can finally be paid in cash.
If you have inherited property, inherited vacant land, feel free to reach out to TB Properties Buys Land. We purchase 10 plus acres all over the country. We exclusively work with title companies for your safety as well as for ours. We pay quickly with cash. We don’t have to get a loan to secure the transaction. Please feel free to reach out to us. We look forward to working with you. Thanks again for following us on this series of Fact or Fiction, Myth or Reality.